It's common to hear people saying things like "meetings are broken". This is even more amplified in the age of Zoom.

However I don't believe meetings are broken. I think it's a symptom, not a cause.

Instead I believe that corporate decision making is broken. Let me explain...

One of the biggest problems I see in corporate decision making is the general unwillingness to make a decision. This is because making decisions is hard, and there's a really good chance you'll get them wrong. As such people prefer to kick decisions down the road.

We need more date. We need more time. We need more input. We need to talk to an expert.

These are all valid points, but a weird thing happens. The more information you have, the harder the decision becomes because the more conflicting views you have to juggle.

It's like the Eero Saarinen

"Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan"

But rather than stopping at the room, they iterate to the city plan.

It becomes a classic case of problem-solution inflation. Every time you try to solve the problem, you go up a context and the problem becomes harder, till you eventually stop trying to solve it because it.

It's worth noting here that not making a decision, even if it's subconscious, is a form of decisions making.

So the problem stems from the complexity and inherent unknowability of the future, the fallacy that having more complete information makes it easier rather than harder to predict the future, and an unwillingness to make mistakes for fear of the reputational harm it may cause.

As a result we're stuck in a never ending cycle of non-decisions, leading to meetings about meetings about meetings.

One of the things I LOVE about Designers, and is shared with most Entrepreneurs I know, is their comfort with ambiguity and their willingness to take leaps into the unknown.

It's the point in the double diamond that switches from Divergent to Convergent. The point where you feel that gathering more information leads to diminishing returns. That there is no certainty and at some point you just have to make decisions and test your hypothesis.

It's probably got a lot to do with Designers main mode of thinking — Abductive reasoning.

More on the subject here http://www.jonkolko.com/writingAbductiveThinking.php

I think one of the big problems between Designers are traditional decision makers, is that they are more comfortable, more used to, and arguably trained to use Deductive and Inductive thinking, so Abductive thinking feels risky.

Conversely one of the problems I think Designers have with Entrepreneurs, the folks typically pushing early stage start-ups forwards, is that they're using Abductive reasoning to, but without a process or a lot of data.

As such, to a designer it feel like the decisions are being made on a whim, which is ironically how a lot of traditional business stakeholders view many design decisions.